


thought for the day

by moonjuicewiththepresident



Series: tma [6]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Arachnophobia, Body Horror, Giant Spiders, Horror, Mind Manipulation, Psychological Horror, Scientist Logic | Logan Sanders, Spider Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Spiders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23727169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonjuicewiththepresident/pseuds/moonjuicewiththepresident
Summary: Things always seem so obvious in retrospect. That experiment was always a terrible idea. Even at the time, Remus remembers thinking it sounded like something out of a horror movie. Every time he heard a new detail about it he’d go home and tell his husband, Dee, and they’d speculate over dinner about how it was going to go wrong in some grotesque and horrific way. They’d laugh and suggest the ways it could turn those poor grad students into crazed killers or mutated monsters.
Relationships: Minor Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders/Deceit Sanders - Relationship
Series: tma [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1707199
Kudos: 32





	thought for the day

Things always seem so obvious in retrospect. That experiment was always a terrible idea. Even at the time, Remus remembers thinking it sounded like something out of a horror movie. Every time he heard a new detail about it he’d go home and tell his husband, Dee, and they’d speculate over dinner about how it was going to go wrong in some grotesque and horrific way. They’d laugh and suggest the ways it could turn those poor grad students into crazed killers or mutated monsters.

And when Remus started to see more and more spiders around the lab, he turned the very real sense of unease into the… the fun sort of fear, like he was just playing at being scared. It’s so strange, even when you’re really looking for horror, it’s impossible to actually believe it. It always feels like something you made up. Just having a bit of fun scaring yourself. Because those things don’t happen. Not in the real world.

But you think sometimes about what the real world is. Just what your brain mixes together from what your senses tell you. We create the world in a lot of ways. It shouldn’t be surprising that, when we’re not being careful, we can change it.

He was just one of the cleaners. He had no idea how or why they started it or, God knows, where the funding came from. He found it hard to believe the Psych Department okayed it, but Remus wasn’t an academic, and those decisions were way over his head.

Remus mainly took care of the science labs. Most of the cleaning crews at the university get shifted around a lot, working in different buildings or departments one month to the next, but there’s a lot of stuff in the labs that require additional training to clean safely, so they were a bit more specialized than the rest. They still didn’t let him within spitting distance of the really expensive equipment; that was all taken care of by the lab techs, but the point is, he was a much more familiar face around the science departments than a cleaner would otherwise be.

There was also the fact that the science lot actually talked to him on occasion. Remus didn’t want to say it’s ‘cause he was white and the rest of the cleaning crew isn’t, but they always talked to him in a way they didn’t talk to the others, so he became the de facto point of contact between the cleaners and the rest of the staff. Long story short, Remus generally knew roughly what the deal was with most of the experiments being run at any point.

So when Dr. Logan Sanders told him about the latest study by his psychology postgrads, Remus thought he was pulling his leg. The Psych Department was generally one of the least demanding from his perspective as it was almost entirely people sitting at computers or in interview rooms. Once or twice Remus thought they were given use of an MRI machine at some hospital or other, but that’s more a neuroscience thing and, more importantly, didn’t happen in the buildings he cleaned.

Since he’d been there, which was a good seven years now, they’ve never crossed over into parapsychology, nothing even remotely less than respectable research, so when Logan explained the experiment and Remus realized they were basically doing ESP research, he got a bit excited. He dressed it up with all sorts of science jargon and sent Remus’s head spinning plenty, but it still basically boiled down to seeing if the thoughts and feelings of a group of people in one room had any effect on the experience of a subject in a separate, sealed room. He could talk about “group dynamics” and call it “proximity intuition” or whatever it was he said, but Remus knew ESP research when he was mopping its floors.

Not that Remus minded, of course; he loved that crap. He was a horror nut but generally would tend toward the more sci-fi end. Demons and ghosts have never really got him but give him aliens or the sinister powers of the human mind and he was there.

He didn’t tell any of this to Logan, of course, he got the impression that it was a bit of a sore spot, and he had no reason to piss off the people he worked with. But you can be damn sure Remus was keeping a much closer eye on this experiment than he was the others. Especially when Logan told him a bit more about how they were doing it.

The basic premise was pretty similar to most of these studies. There was a room with a one-way mirror where the subject would sit, and they’d be strapped up to measure physical responses. The other side of the glass was anywhere between one and twenty participants, who would be receiving stimulus for a certain response or feeling. Those feelings would be incited while their attention was on the subject through the mirror.

Then they simply measured what, if any, response the subject had to something they couldn’t see, hear or otherwise be aware of. Sometimes the subject was told there were people on the other side of the glass when there weren’t, in order to get a control group and weed out any placebo responses. The subject’s name was Virgil Cane.

What really got Remus, though, was what Logan told him about the specific nature of the feelings they were trying to project. They were planning to work with fear. Specifically, they had selected as projectors a group of people who self-identified as arachnophobes, and at certain points of their watching Virgil, videos of spiders crawling, eating and spawning would be randomly projected over the glass, inciting an acute fear response.

The reasoning was that fear was both an extremely powerful emotion and one that would be quite easy to distinguish in Virgil’s responses. They wanted to see if they could use ESP to scare him.

It sounded like a set-up to a horror movie, right? Remus didn’t know how they didn’t see that. Maybe they did. Maybe they went ahead with it for the same reason Remus joked with Dee about it instead of requesting a transfer. You come to relish the ghoulishness of it, because deep down you know it’s safe. The worst that might happen would a few upset students. It should have just been an idle flight of fancy.

Remus couldn’t really speak to what happened for the majority of the study. For obvious reasons, he wasn’t cleaning the rooms in question while they were doing the tests, but heard a few bits and pieces about it from Logan and some of the other researchers. It seemed to be going well to begin with. Virgil was displaying some subtle but statistically significant signs of distress and unease while the spiders were being shown. Signs that were noticeably absent during the control periods.

Remus knew that the fear reactions were certainly serious enough for the poor souls that had unwittingly signed up as projectors: he had to clean up when one of them was sick during the first round of testing. They had to leave the experiment.

I’m sure you can guess what Remus ended up cleaning more and more of over the course of the study. Cobwebs. You can’t avoid them in buildings with high ceilings and inviting corners, but even so, there were more and more of them each day. He would brush or vacuum them away in an evening only to find them returned the next morning, thicker than ever.

He never got a good look at the spiders behind them. Unlike most of the ones he’d seen, sitting fat and proud in the center of their web, the most Remus ever saw of these ones would be a quick scuttle of dark legs disappearing into a hole in the plaster or behind a wall installation.

It creeped him out plenty, but in a good way. He knew that, logically, they were just escaping the winter. It had been unusually cold for Florida lately. Remus would try to spook Logan, telling him how his dark experiments were summoning up an army of spiders.

The tests were progressing, and they had started introducing multiple projectors at once to see how it affected the intensity of the feelings Virgil was receiving. Logan was very excited by the results. Remus remembered his face as he told me that Virgil had apparently reported having several unsettling dreams about spiders.

Notably, at no point in the experiment had he been informed that it was spiders being used. Logan was excited, telling Remus how the dreams seemed to map very well to the physiological responses they had been recording; how Virgil had dreamed of “tiny legs running along his veins like a web”.

It was then they started to have problems, though. While adding additional projectors had at first increased the severity of the responses, it seemed this had very quickly tapered off, and soon the measurements had changed significantly. They were still getting noticeable responses, but they weren’t like the ones they had gotten before. They didn’t appear to be fear.

Logan was irritated by this. Even though the results still looked good for a general ESP study, the variation in response tone would apparently muddy the research in ways he wasn’t keen on.

Remus only saw Virgil Cane once during this period. He wasn’t hard to pick out. He dressed like a vintage punk store exploded on him, and his short black hair stood out sharply against pale skin. The first time Remus saw him he’d liked him. He looked like the kind of student who occasionally talked to cleaners like we were people. Not that they’d ever actually spoken, but he had that air about him.

This time, though, it was just as he was leaving the mirror room. He was walking strangely, like his jeans didn’t fit him right. Hee kept bending his knees at kind of odd angles, holding himself with this stiffness. His arm was extended, and he ran his hand along the wall as he went, moving his fingers rapidly so it scuttled like… well, like a spider with its legs missing.

Even then Remus didn’t really start to consider what might be happening. No, he didn’t take it seriously until what happened that Thursday. He’d pulled a late shift and had just finished his first sweep of the labs. He’d made a start on mopping the corridors leading up to the rooms Logan had been using when he noticed the lights were still on. Now, he’d mentioned that that afternoon they were trying the first sessions with all nineteen of the remaining projectors - they’d had a predictably high dropout rate.

Now, he knows that the more people you have involved in a test, the longer it tends to take and the more potential there is for delays, so it might well have overrun, but it was half nine in the evening by that point, so it seemed very unlikely it would have gone on that long. Remus thought maybe they’d just left the lights on by accident. These things happen. He did my best to forget that the lights in those rooms were normally motion activated.

He hoped someday he would forget what he saw when he opened that door, but he won’t. All the arachnophobes, Logan’s “projectors”, were stood in two circles, the one inside of the other. Their hands and arms were locked together in a complex, interlocking pattern and they walked around, rotating the whole thing slowly but surely.

Logan wasn’t there, but in the corner I could see one of his postgrad students, Remus thought he was Mark, standing there, staring like he was in some sort of trance. They all looked like they were in some sort of trance.

On the other side of the glass, he could see Virgil Cane stood there, staring at them. His body was hunched over and contorted in a way that was definitely not natural, and Remus really wanted it to have been a trick of the light, but for a second it looked like he had more than two eyes.

Almost as soon as he opened the room, the movement of the circle stopped abruptly and their heads snapped to face him all at once. Remus froze in panic. They dropped their arms to the side, and for a moment he was sure they were going to attack me, but instead they turned back towards the window, towards Virgil, and walked up to it, lining close in front of the glass.

With a sudden, jerky motion, they drew their heads back, then slammed them into the mirrored window, shattering it all at once. Remus wanted to run, but he couldn’t will my body to move. He just stood there, watching the blood run down from the cuts in their foreheads, as Virgil began to climb through the broken window, his limbs moving and reaching, slowly and deliberately. The others didn’t move a muscle as he crawled over them, then over the floor towards Remus.

When he was about a foot away from Remus, he drew herself up to his full height. Remus didn’t know exactly how tall he had been before, but now he loomed over him by almost a full foot. His eyes locked on his, and Remus began to feel something. It was like a hundred tiny, scurrying legs inside his skull, moving and scampering through his mind.

Remus felt his hands, which had dropped to the side of his body, begin to raise. They gripped his legs and then, apparently of their own accord, they began to crawl up him, climbing slowly over his stomach, his chest, his shoulders, until, finally, they came to rest upon Remus’ throat. He’d never been particularly strong but that didn’t seem to matter as his own fingers began to close around his neck like a vice.

Panic was making him breathe fast and shallow, but within seconds Remus couldn’t even do that. It took a lot longer to suffocate than Remus would have thought. Remus had no idea exactly how long it was before the edges of his vision began to go dark, but it felt like forever.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mark, the researcher, move. Remus didn’t know how he’d broken whatever spell Virgil had put him under but he’d apparently managed to. With a sudden, unexpected motion, he charged at Virgil and slammed his full weight into his side.

The attack took him completely off guard and he fell hard against the edge of the broken window, the side of his head making a god awful crunching sound as it hit. All at once the others collapsed onto the floor, like their strings had been cut. Remus’ hands dropped as well, and he took a long, painful gasp of air.

He collapsed, taking a few moments to try and regain himself. Mark already had his phone out and was trying to call the police. He was groggy and his brain felt like someone had taken a belt-sander to it, but he managed to struggle to his feet. Remus looked at the crumpled form of Virgil Cane just as it started to get back up. He could see the side of his skull had been caved in, and beneath the wet mess of blood and bone, Remus saw a mass of dull white cobweb.

He ran. He ran out of that building, back to his car and he just drove away. Remus drove for almost an hour before he finally pulled into a side road and started crying. He never saw any of them again.

The University administration contacted him before the police did. They told me in no uncertain terms that if Remus valued his job, he had officially not been in the building that night. Remus didn’t really know what he’d have told tell the cops anyway, and he needed that job, so when he was questioned, Remus told them he’d been home sick with a stomach bug. The fact that he looked like death helped convince them, and he wore a high-necked shirt to the interview.

Official line was that Virgil had suffered a psychotic break and broken the window, injuring a lot of people with broken glass before beating Mark half to death and fleeing the building. The others in that room don’t seem to remember anything, and he didn’t know if Mark ever mentioned Remus in his testimony. He and Logan still haven’t returned to the University, and he had not made any efforts to contact them.

As far as he knew, Virgil Cane was still out there. Remus was keeping his distance from anything even remotely spider-related, though. He somehow managed to live through one horror movie. He has no intention of going looking for another.


End file.
